Former member of the Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus

Said that Republican Congressional leaders were "practicing genocide with a smile" and were "worse than Hitler"

Died in October 2013

Major Owens was a Democratic Member of Congress who represented the 11th District of New York from 1983-2007. Located in Brooklyn, this district is nearly 60% African-American, 12% Hispanic, and 21% Caucasian.

Owens was born in Memphis, Tennessee in June 1936. He earned a B.A. from Morehouse College in 1956 and a Master of Library Science degree from Atlanta University in 1957. He then moved to New York City and worked as a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library from 1958-65.

During the 1960s, Owens became chair of the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality. He served as a New York City Community Development Agency Commissioner from 1968-73. And from 1973-74 he was Director of the Community Media Library Program at Columbia University.

In 1974 Owens was elected to the New York State Senate and went on to serve there for eight years. When incumbent congresswoman Shirley Chisholm retired from the 11th Congressional District in 1982, Owens ran for her vacated seat and defeated her hand-picked successor. He was re-elected every two years thereafter, through his final campaign in 2006.

against separate welfare reform bills designed to move people off the welfare rolls and into paying jobs;

in favor of prohibiting oil and gas exploration in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR);

against a proposal to fund offshore oil exploration along the Outer Continental Shelf;

against school vouchers in Washington, DC;

against ending racial preferences in college admissions;

against banning the procedure commonly known as partial-birth abortion; and

against imposing additional criminal penalties for harming a fetus during the commission of a crime against a pregnant woman. (The abortion-rights group NARAL gave Owens’ voting record a 100 percent rating).

For additional information about how Owens voted on a variety of key issues, click here.

Shortly after Republican leaders had become the governing majority in the House of Representatives in 1995, Owens said of them: "These are people who are practicing genocide with a smile. They're worse than Hitler."

Also in the mid-1990s, Owens made headlines when he said, on the House floor, that during the trans-Atlantic slave trade some 200 million African slaves bound for America had been thrown overboard by their white captors. This, he explained, had permanently changed the ecology of the Atlantic Ocean and had caused sharks, as a species, to begin following ships (in search of food).

Owens retired from his House of Representatives seat at the end of his term in January 2007.